Puppet Master Read online

  He caught a glimpse of himself as he swallowed four Tylenol for his headache. Tolevi looked like a Russian businessman, or maybe a member of the mafya—gray suit jacket over a plaid shirt, new leather briefcase hanging from a strap.

  His black hair had a few strands of gray. Had those been there before he left the States?

  He slicked them down before heading to the food court.

  Tolevi’s CIA contact was milling around near the popsicle-shaped pop art sculpture by the escalator. Tolevi was surprised—ordinarily a low-level officer, usually fresh from the farm, met him. Instead, it was Yuri Johansen himself.

  That couldn’t be good.

  Tolevi went to the Burger King kiosk and bought a Whopper, along with fries and a shake, then found an empty table. Ordinarily, his contact would wait, confirm his identity, then follow him to the restroom, where they would make the exchange. But Johansen came straight over and asked if he could sit.

  Another very bad sign.

  Tolevi gestured for him to sit. He played it as if he didn’t know the man, not sure what to expect.

  “We heard what happened at the airport,” said the CIA officer. “We’re glad you made it.”

  I’ll bet.

  “Did you get it?” added Johansen.

  Tolevi glanced up at him. “When exactly have I failed?” he said in Russian.

  Johansen smiled. His Russian was very good, but he stuck to English.

  “We’re very appreciative. There’ll be a bonus.”

  “The man I met in Kerch,” said Tolevi. “Very young. The movement—I don’t know how long they can last.”

  He’d debated whether to mention it, deciding he better, in case something went wrong.

  “The loyalists are clearly losing ground if they’re scraping the bottom of the barrel,” he explained. “And that is bad for my business as well. Bad all around.”

  “I see.” Johansen seemed neither concerned nor surprised. But then he never did.

  So how had he heard about the problem at the airport? Perhaps the man with the bad haircut worked for him, rather than the Russians.

  Tolevi bit into the hamburger. It didn’t quite taste like a burger he’d have back in the States. Then again, he rarely if ever ate at a fast-food restaurant; that was only something he did as part of the recognition routine.

  Maybe a way for the CIA to torture him, he thought.

  “We have something critical coming up we were wondering if you could handle,” said Johansen. “We need to get somebody out.”

  “That’s not my usual line,” said Tolevi.

  “You’ve done it before.”

  “That was a onetime deal,” said Tolevi, picking up a French fry. “I’ve been thinking about getting out of the business completely.”

  “Can you afford that? The rent on your town house is very high. Your car lease, the summer house in Maine? And you owe quite a bit of money to your friends, I understand.”

  “Easily paid,” lied Tolevi. He was, in fact, quite a bit in the hole of late; several deals had not worked out, costing him his principal.

  “And then there’s college tuition soon.”

  The reference to his daughter was subtle, but not subtle enough. It was more like something the Russian FGB would say.

  “That’s not a threat,” said Johansen quickly. “I’m just saying compensation will be very good for this. And then maybe that will be the time for a sabbatical. When it’s done.”

  “What exactly are we talking about?”

  “In a few days.” Johansen rose, then reached across and took the briefcase Tolevi had put on the seat. “Go home and rest. Have a good flight.”

  23

  Boston—the next day

  I’m in a room with an aquarium.

  I’m in an aquarium.

  Who are these people talking?

  Why are the lights on?

  Johnny Givens opened his eyes. He wasn’t exactly sure where he was.

  No, he knew he was in a hospital. How he knew that, though, he couldn’t say.

  A woman was standing over him. She was smiling.

  A nurse. She wore a paisley blue top and white pants.

  A man stood next to her. Older. Gray hair. He was frowning.

  “Doc?” he muttered.

  “I’m not your doctor. My name is Louis Massina. I’m responsible for your being here.”

  “You found me?”

  The nurse choked back a laugh.

  “No. I had you moved here. You needed a new heart.”

  “What?”

  “Dr. Gleason will be in soon to explain,” said the nurse.

  “Can I have some water?” Johnny asked.

  The nurse left to fetch it. Massina stared at him, his face stone.

  “You’ve lost your legs. Both of them,” Massina told him. “We’re preparing prosthetics.”

  “What? My legs? They’re here. I feel them.” Johnny started to push himself up, but a black wave hit him and slammed his head back to the pillow.

  “They’re not,” said Massina coldly. “It’s phantom pain. They’ve done a lot of work on you. They’re going to do more. The sooner you can start rehabilitation, the better.”

  “What the hell are you talking about?” asked Johnny.

  “The heart is designed to last ten years. By then, either you’ll be a candidate for a human one, or we’ll have a better model. I suspect both. It’ll be your choice.”

  “What?”

  “We’ve given you drugs to speed your recovery. Normally it takes weeks to get stumps. In my day, it was months. Many months. The drugs will make it happen overnight. Literally. Without them you would have died. There are side effects,” Massina added, “but we’ll get into that when you’re well.”

  “Who the hell are you?”

  “I’m sorry you were hurt,” said Massina. He turned to leave.

  “Wait,” demanded Johnny. “My legs—”

  “You won’t miss them.”

  “What the hell are you saying? How would you know?”

  Massina removed his sport jacket, then slowly rolled up the right-hand sleeve of his sweater. He reached his left hand up to his shoulder below the shirt. Then he removed the arm and held it toward Johnny.

  The black wave returned. Johnny felt as if he was going to faint. Massina left without saying another word.

  24

  Boston—the next day

  Borya threw herself back on the bed, rolling against the twenty-dollar bills she’d sorted into neat piles perpendicular to her pillows. Her home “stash” amounted to just over a thousand dollars, including money from her birthday, her godmother’s semi-monthly presents, and her dad’s allowance. It was literally more cash than she knew what to do with; it didn’t count her “secret” money, or even the bills hidden in an envelope taped to the back of the dresser: two hundred and fifty-seven dollars she had saved from her last enterprise, helping Gordon Heller dispose of two stolen TVs last year.

  She shouldn’t have done that. Three years older than her, Gordon had practically hypnotized her at the time, though now she couldn’t begin to imagine why. He was smelly and not very bright, though obviously smart enough to find someone else to deflect blame when doing something illegal. Two days after she told him she wasn’t going to give him a bj—as he called it—he started going out with Cynthia Greiss, and that was that.

  Jerk.

  But what was she going to do with all this money?

  A new computer. Her MSI was starting to seem a little slow, even though it was only six months old. TromboneHackerD had been bragging on Asus lately; maybe she’d check it out.

  She didn’t have enough for that. She wasn’t going to touch the money she’d already hidden in the Austrian bank—the vast bulk of her gleanings from the ATMs. There was a reason to do one more round, then close down.

  OK. A goal.

  Borya rolled back off the bed, gathered the money back into four separate piles, and hid it away in various place
s in her room. Then she grabbed a sweatshirt, checked her hair, and went down to get her bike.

  When she’d started, the ATM enterprise had been a challenge and a lark, a goof, a little bit of fun and excitement. It didn’t hurt anyone, not like Gordon’s thefts; the banks made good, from what she heard. She had started by looking into skimmers, then realized that the card machine her father had locked in his office safe gave her possibilities far beyond what a skimmer gang might have. Figuring out how to get the safe open was harder than the coding.

  Not really. But the coding wasn’t all that hard to do, with the help of a little research on the Internet.

  But the excitement had worn off. It was time to try something else.

  What exactly?

  Borya pondered the possibilities as she unchained her bike from beneath the back porch.

  Tolevi leaned forward in the backseat as the sedan pulled up the street near his house. As always, he felt a slight touch of nostalgia, remembering how his wife would always be waiting when he returned. That was more than a decade ago, several lifetimes, and a different continent.

  As he reached for the door, a figure darted from the driveway of the neighbor’s house, one door down. It mounted a bicycle, smoothly gliding down the street.

  Was that his daughter, Borya?

  It certainly looked like her: slim build, pressing down toward the handlebars exactly the way she rode. The rider passed under a lamppost near the corner; he or she was wearing a gray hoodie.

  None of this was exactly verification, but he was sure it was Borya. And he was also sure it was past 8:00 p.m., which was her absolute curfew when he was out of town.

  What the hell was she up to?

  “Indulge me,” Tolevi told the driver. “See if you can follow that girl on the bike. The one who just turned. I want to see where she’s going.”

  “But—”

  “It’s my daughter,” said Tolevi sharply. “I want to see where she’s going. She’s breaking curfew.”

  “I don’t know, sir.”

  Tolevi leaned forward and dropped a hundred-dollar bill on the front seat of the limo.

  “I have boys myself,” said the driver, putting the car in gear. “Much safer.”

  25

  FBI surveillance van, Cambridge—same time

  “The problem with the Sox is that they can’t get consistent pitching,” said Flores. “And they traded away Trey Ball. He was a phenom. Believe me.”

  “Would have been a phenom. Maybe,” said Jenkins.

  Chelsea tuned the men out as they continued to argue, gently, about baseball. She checked the gear; they were tapped into twelve teller machines tonight, and would be able to cover another two dozen by the end of the week.

  If they hacked into the ATM clearinghouses—something like bus depots for bank transactions—they could cover them all. But even Massina thought that was a bit too far.

  For now, anyway.

  Jenkins would definitely veto it. Chelsea could tell that he was having second thoughts about what they were doing, even though it had been his idea. He had a line in his head that he wasn’t going to cross, though he wasn’t very good at explaining exactly where it was.

  They had eight UAVs in the air tonight, each doing what the flight engineers called an orbit around their designated air space. The orbits—slightly elliptical patterns—were designed by the computer for maximum coverage.

  Chelsea toggled from Hum to Hum, looking at the infrared feeds. The people walking each starred in a movie she’d come in halfway through, and would leave before it ended. She was a strange kind of voyeur, watching them as if she were sailing above them, an angel from heaven looking for the soul she’d been sent to find.

  Or the devil, maybe.

  The system blurted an alert.

  ATM 4 – unusual activity detected. ATM 4

  The UAV in that area tucked its wing and sped in the direction of the machine, a mere three blocks away.

  “I have something,” said Chelsea.

  26

  Boston—same time

  By the time his daughter turned onto Warren Street in Watertown, Tolevi had decided that he had seen quite enough. He couldn’t imagine why she was riding so far from home.

  Or to be more precise, he didn’t want to imagine. He shut out all possibilities—boyfriends, drugs, worse—and did his best to clamp down on his simmering anger. As they neared Boston Children’s Hospital, Tolevi wondered if perhaps Borya was visiting a young friend. While that wouldn’t be completely acceptable—she was still out of the house past her assigned curfew—it would still be far better than any of the other possibilities. But she rode past, stopping at a bank machine down the street.

  To buy drugs?

  “Let me out,” Tolevi told the driver. “And wait. Come on, come on!”

  The driver pulled across a driveway. Tolevi leapt from the car and ran to the ATM. His daughter was just grabbing her bike.

  “Borya! Borya!” he yelled.

  “Daddy?” Startled, the girl dropped her bike on the ground.

  “What are you doing here?” Tolevi demanded. He felt his hands trembling; the idea of his daughter as a drug addict or worse was unnerving.

  “Daddy—what are you doing here?”

  “I just came home. Why are you out? What are you doing?”

  “Nothing. I was . . .”

  Her voice trailed off.

  “What’s in your hand?”

  “Nothing.”

  Tolevi leaned forward and snatched his daughter’s hand. She tried to jerk it away. Though he was surprised at her strength, in the end the young teenager was no match for him. A bank card fluttered from her hand to the pavement.

  “What money did you take?” he demanded.

  “You hurt me, Daddy.”

  “No tears, girl. That won’t work with me.” He was lying—already his daughter’s distress was having its effect. His anger weakened. Borya was too precious for Tolevi to be completely unaffected. But this was for her own good. “Where’s the money?”

  “I didn’t take money.”

  “Empty your pockets!”

  He expected defiance, but instead Borya put her hands into her front pockets and turned them inside out. Her cell phone was in her back pocket; she showed it to him, slipping her hand in the other to show it was empty.

  “Whose card is this?” he shouted. He glanced at it. “It’s not mine.” No answer, just averted eyes. “What’s the PIN number?” he demanded, holding up the card.

  “I’m going home.”

  “Get in the car,” he demanded.

  “I’m going home.” She picked up her bike and hopped on.

  Tolevi started to grab her, then decided to let her go. He turned back to the machine and put the card in.

  He hesitated for a moment, his mind blanking as he tried to recall her birthdate. It was the most logical pin.

  September 10. 9–10. 09–10

  He hit the keys. That didn’t work.

  Maybe 9–0–1–0? Or was it just the year she was born?

  As he started to punch the numbers, a car sped down the street. Hit the brakes hard; the screech filled Tolevi with a dread he hadn’t felt since the doctor walked toward him in the hospital the night his wife died.

  Borya! Oh no!

  Two men jumped from the car. All he could think of was that they had hit her.

  It took a few seconds for him to realize that wasn’t the case at all. By then, each man was on a knee, aiming a Glock 40 pistol at his chest.

  “What is this?”

  “Hands up,” shouted one of the men.

  Tolevi slowly spread his hands. The men were between five and seven meters away, too far for him to try knocking away the weapons.

  Had his daughter set him up? Impossible.

  Who was behind this? Medved? Sergi?

  One of the men was black, and the Russian mob never used blacks.

  “Keep your hands up,” said the closer man.

>   “Are you robbing me? I have no money,” said Tolevi. “I’ll give you this bank card. That’s all I have.”

  “Toss it down.”

  Tolevi’s mind jumped to a calmer place. He would talk himself out of this, get close enough to grab one of the guns and then kill them both.

  Or just give them his wallet. A cost of doing business. And of seeing his daughter again.

  Borya! I didn’t meant to yell at you, baby. It’s just, you frustrate me sometimes. What were you doing out past curfew?

  “Step back to the machine,” said the man closest to him.

  “It’s just business,” said Tolevi. “No need for excitement.”

  “Turn around and face the wall,” said the man. His partner rose and scooped up the ATM card.

  “I don’t think that’s a good idea. You get the money, I get away and forget who you are. I’m sure that’s a great deal for all of us.”

  “We’re not robbing you, asshole,” growled the man who had retrieved the bank card. “We’re with the FBI, and you’re under arrest.”

  27

  Boston—twenty minutes later

  Borya fought back tears as she raced the last block to the house. She was angry with her father, and angry with herself. Why had he come back early? Didn’t he trust her?

  Why had she insisted on going out one more time? Where was the sense in that?

  What was she going to tell him? He had the card. Of course, accessing the account wouldn’t tell him anything, certainly not what she was up to.

  There was thirty-seven dollars and change in the account. He’d ask where she got it.

  That wouldn’t be the only question he’d ask. Or the hardest.

  How did you set this account up? You’re not eighteen.